Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  Today, John Young and Charlie Duke are walking on the moon. Far ahead of them, mountains stand stark white against the deep black of the sky. These men have work to do here on the Plain of Descartes, but they enjoy themselves as they work. You can see it in the way they jump higher than is strictly necessary, you can hear the glee in their voices through the crackling of the static between the moon and Houston. Even without looking up the video online, you can picture their low-gravity antics: you’ve seen it many times. Envision the astronauts bobbing along gently in their white space suits, their light-heartedness in strange contrast to the alien hostility of the terrain, in contrast to the risk of death all around them, the risk of death ahead of them on their way back home. You aren’t concerned for them; you already know they’ll get home safely.

  As they work, John Young and Charlie Duke chat happily with each other, with their crewmate Ken Mattingly, alone in lunar orbit, and with Mission Control in Houston. In the course of a daily news update, the astronauts learn that Congress has just approved a budget for fiscal 1973. This budget includes funding NASA has requested to get started on its still-hypothetical space shuttle program. When he hears the news, John Young remarks, “The country needs that shuttle mighty bad. You’ll see.” He doesn’t know yet that he will command the very first space shuttle mission, and he also doesn’t know how frustratingly long it will take to get that shuttle flying. He can’t guess the mixed history the shuttle will live out, the way it will be doomed by compromises even before it rolls out to the launchpad for the first time. He can’t know that two shuttle disasters will kill fourteen of his fellow astronauts, forever changing the history of American spaceflight.

  It is this moment I want to describe to my students who don’t understand the difference between Apollo and shuttle. This moment, a moonwalker reacting with joy on the surface of the moon because the shuttle era has officially begun, is the seam between the two.

  After one last moonwalk, John Young and Charlie Duke climb back into their lunar module, secure their haul of new moon rocks, and fire the ascent rockets to lift them up to orbital rendezvous with Ken Mattingly and the command module. After a four-day journey back to Earth, the crew in their capsule splash into the Pacific Ocean and are greeted aboard the USS Ticonderoga with the same patriotic fanfare with which every American astronaut has been welcomed home. But when I study those photographs now, I can see a wistful, bewildered look in the eyes of the astronauts, a look that can be seen in the eyes of the current crop of American astronauts. It’s a look of being grounded, of being trapped on the surface of the home planet. A look of wanting to go up in the bird, though they had only just returned. A masculine envy of their own selves.

  When we think about the Apollo project now, we think of it as being a time when all Americans were united behind a project they could take pride in. The fact is that Americans were slowly falling out of love with Apollo right from the beginning. Even before Neil, Buzz, and Mike made it to the moon, only about a third of Americans thought the moon project was worth the cost. At the same time, a clear majority of Americans throughout the sixties said they approved of Apollo; in other words, uneasiness about the cost of spaceflight has always been paired with widespread positive feelings about spaceflight. This contradiction has made NASA the site of one of the deeper ambiguities of American culture: spaceflight is an achievement we take great pride in, paid for with our own money, over our objections.

  Hugely wasteful; hugely grand. Adjust the focus of your eyes and the same project goes from being the greatest accomplishment of humankind to a pointless show of misspent wealth.

  None of my students have heard of Wernher von Braun or the German rocket program. Von Braun ran the rocket design facility for the Third Reich at Peenemünde, where he was responsible for the development of the V-2 rocket, the first human-made object to enter space, a weapon used to bomb Allied cities. At the end of the war, von Braun and his team surrendered to the United States and managed to immigrate here in order to resume their work on rockets. Von Braun’s membership in the SS and the Nazi party would haunt him, and throughout his life he would have to answer to new charges about what he knew and what he was responsible for, especially having to do with the slave laborers forced to construct the V-2. As popular a public figure as he was in the United States, von Braun could never entirely get away from the specter of the concentration camps, and even at the moment of triumph for his Saturn rocket, his adopted country couldn’t quite forget his past. Von Braun maintained all his life that he only wanted to build rockets for the peaceful exploration of space, and that he worked on weapons only because doing so allowed him to continue his research. The evidence seems to bear this out—in researching his biography of von Braun, historian Michael J. Neufeld uncovered documents that show von Braun resisting joining the SS as long as possible, even after he had become director at Peenemünde. Though when it became clear that his failure to join would not be overlooked, von Braun did join the SS and was seen wearing the uniform on a number of occasions, including in several surviving photographs. Some survivors later accused him of overseeing beatings and executions of prisoners, though historians question whether this was a case of mistaken identity.

  Von Braun himself has always denied that he had anything to do with violence against prisoners, or that he knew the extent of their mistreatment. Of course, he knew his rockets were being built by prisoners, and to some this is enough. To many, though, surprisingly many, von Braun’s crimes can be if not forgiven at least contextualized. When Oriana Fallaci met him, she described his large frame, his “heavy paunch, the florid complexion of a beer drinker,” his handsome face. She describes his Prussian accent: he “manages to make the softest words sound hard: such as Moon.”

  As he talks he stands erect like a general addressing a stupid recruit and his smile is so cold that it seems more like a threat than a smile. Odd: by all rights he should be unlikable and yet he isn’t. For half an hour I made myself dislike him. To my utter astonishment I found myself feeling just the opposite.

  As an Italian who worked for the Resistance and lost a great deal in the war, Fallaci is well positioned to articulate certain grudges, to argue that von Braun was an opportunist and a murderer. But she finds she can’t. “Although I am one who doesn’t forget,” she writes, “I find it dishonest and unfair to deny von Braun what is von Braun’s, to leave him out of a tale of this kind.” She points out that Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer made the atom bomb that killed civilians in Japan. Is von Braun different?

  When Fallaci asks von Braun whether he would go to the moon himself, he answers that he’d go in a second. (Neufeld’s biography reveals that this has been his desire since childhood, that the dream of space travel is what led him to develop rockets in the first place.) “Maybe they’ll put up with me on flight number 10,” von Braun muses to Fallaci, “like you put up with a grumbling old uncle, to make me happy.” When the space shuttle emerged as the spacecraft to follow his Saturn V, with its lesser physical demands on astronauts, von Braun speculated it might be an appropriate vehicle for an older spacefarer to travel on, and indeed NASA may have let him, as they indulged John Glenn in a flight on Discovery at age seventy-seven, but by the time the shuttle was ready to fly, von Braun was dead, from pancreatic cancer, at age sixty-five.

  Apollo 17, the last mission ever flown on von Braun’s Saturn V, is remembered largely for a photograph the astronauts took of Earth once they were far enough away to see the whole thing. Nicknamed the “Blue Marble,” the image was the first to show the entirety of Earth illuminated and suspended in space. Carl Sagan called the photograph an “icon of our age.” Africa can clearly be seen, and the white cloud cover over Antarctica swirls like a delicate lace. The image is one of the most widely distributed photographs ever taken—next time you see an image of the whole earth in any context, look closely: it’s probably the Blue Marble. The image has even been credited with the rise of the environmental movement in the s
eventies. A few years ago, I met Jack Schmitt, a geologist who flew on Apollo 17 and walked on the moon. There is some debate over which of the astronauts actually snapped the picture, but Schmitt told me it was him, and I believe him. There is a large framed copy of the photograph hanging on the wall in my son’s room, with an inscription Schmitt wrote for him: “To Elliot, and the future.”

  It’s hard to imagine what it was like for the crew of Apollo 17 to splash down, board the aircraft carrier, strip off their space suits, and write up their reports. They had spent their adult lives preparing for this adventure, they had accomplished it, and no one was planning to go back again. The moon rocks they brought back, including the one I have touched in the Air and Space Museum, would be the last to come back for generations. No one has gone to the moon since, and it would be nearly as difficult for us to try to re-create their trip now as it was to accomplish it then.

  The space shuttle is a far more advanced vehicle than was Apollo/Saturn, but because it lacked the pure thrust to get any farther than low Earth orbit, it felt like a step backward to many Americans. The next vehicle should go farther than the previous one, it seemed obvious. After discovering the New World, Columbus did not take a renewed interest in the area around the Mediterranean. Yet the public had tired of the expense of Apollo even before the missions to the moon had gotten started. After a brief resurgence in interest caused by the drama on Apollo 13, Americans went back to caring less and less about Apollo, saying in larger numbers that it was pointless and too expensive. A scaled-back space vehicle funded partly for its ability to get military and commercial satellites into orbit—a reusable shuttle with a large payload bay—was the only one that had a chance of gaining the approval of Congress. As it was, the shuttle’s funding was the subject of constant wrangling and severe cuts over the years of its development, and it was in danger of being axed altogether multiple times.

  Unlike average Americans, though, rocket engineers saw the space shuttle concept as a huge step forward. If they could build a spaceship the way they wanted to, not with the Soviets breathing down their necks but with the time to build it properly from the ground up, what would that spaceship look like? It would look more like a space plane. It would look elegant. It would be capable of carrying different types of payloads, not only human beings. And it would be reusable. “When I was a kid reading Buck Rogers, the spacecraft all looked like bullets or saucers, with sweeping fins and fancy tail skids,” said astronaut Michael Collins. “We are beginning to see Buck’s dream emerge in the squat but elegant space shuttle.”

  The concept of reusability had been a fantasy of engineers from the beginning—rather than building expendable rockets that would be abandoned in space or burned up in the atmosphere, NASA wanted a vehicle that could launch like a rocket, fly in space, and land like an airplane on a runway. “There’s no way that you can make a railroad cost-effective,” explained a NASA representative, “if you throw away the locomotive every time.” After some maintenance on the ground, a reusable spacecraft could be loaded with new cargo and a new crew of astronauts, to be launched again. An ideal (and, it turns out, entirely unrealistic) turnaround time on the ground was two weeks. The urgency of Apollo, the before-the-decade-is-out deadline, had ruled out anything but the quick-and-dirty approach of attaching hastily designed capsules to rockets of the type that had been developed as weapons. Now that that deadline had been met, rocket engineers had time to go back to their childhood fantasies of spaceflight, their science fiction dreams.

  Most people don’t realize that since the time of Apollo we’ve been in a feedback loop: as a nation, we elect representatives who thwart NASA, and then we blame NASA for its lack of vision. There is a simple and frustratingly predictable pattern: first NASA comes up with an exciting and ambitious long-term plan for getting to Mars, or for getting back to the moon, or for building a space station, or for traveling to an asteroid. Once there is a plan on the table, it is scrutinized and called too ambitious, redundant, unrealistic, or ridiculous. Always it’s called too expensive. One instance of such a vision was Wernher von Braun’s plan for an expedition to Mars, presented to the Senate Space Committee in 1969. He impressed the committee by announcing that on precisely November 12, 1981, two spacecraft would leave Earth for Mars simultaneously. The plan was serious, well thought out, technically sound, and incredibly expensive. It went nowhere. Another example was the Vision for Space Exploration endorsed by George W. Bush in 2004, which called for an extended human presence on the moon. Mostly these long-term plans are rejected by Congress altogether, but once a generation a plan is approved.

  In that rare instance when a plan is approved, it’s always in a scaled-back way, always a compromise of the original lofty vision. Most importantly, it’s always structured in such a way that a future Congress will have to put up the majority of the money, making the whole thing feel precarious at best. Why will a future Congress and president make political sacrifices to fund a project they won’t get credit for in the minds of the public? Congress is a group of ever-changing politicians who answer to constituents of the present, not a fantasy for the far-off future.

  But then of course the scaled-back, cheaper vision is opened up for national ridicule. Why doesn’t NASA dream bigger? Americans complain. Why aren’t they pushing out farther? They’re playing it safe, they’ve lost their vision, lost their way. Once we’re done criticizing the plan, we will start to love it, because spaceflight is fun, and because this is all we’ve got. But then (in the case of shuttle) some of the technical compromises Congress demanded in order to save money will lead to accidents, and NASA will be blamed again, this time for its lack of attention to safety.

  There are four warring interests in spaceflight: ambitiousness of vision, urgency of timetable, reduction of cost, and safety to astronauts. These can never be entirely reconciled. In the sixties, urgency and ambitiousness were the driving factors, and because this was understood and accepted, the massive cost and risk were accepted as well. We now seem to be at a moment when reduction of cost is paramount, with safety coming in a very close second. This being the case, we should not be surprised that ambitiousness and urgency have had to be set aside altogether. But it’s ludicrous to claim, as I often hear people do, that “NASA has lost its vision.” NASA has lost support, not vision.

  Wernher von Braun’s plan for Mars was complex. Getting astronauts to a planet 140 million miles away is even more difficult than getting them to the moon; to travel that far, one would have to construct a much larger space vehicle than could be built on Earth. The best way to assemble such a large vehicle would be to do so in low Earth orbit, using an orbiting space station as a base of operations. And in order to construct a space station, one needs a smaller launch vehicle—ideally a reusable shuttle—to haul the pieces of the station, and then later pieces of the Mars transport, up to Earth orbit. NASA’s plan was for a reusable shuttle with which to construct an orbiting space station with which to construct a large interplanetary spacecraft. As enthusiasm waned toward the end of Apollo, funding became scarce, and most politicians found it expedient to set themselves apart from the expense of spaceflight without going so far as to close down any NASA sites or major contractors, many of which were located in the states and districts of important members of Congress. So NASA got only the budget for the shuttle. By all accounts, it was lucky to get that much. Apollo 17 was the last mission to the moon, launched in December 1972. Meanwhile, Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were unceremoniously canceled, their crews left earthbound until the space shuttle would be ready to fly. Soon NASA’s budget was only one-third what it had been at its peak.

  When President Nixon approved the plan for the space shuttle in 1972, he released a statement:

  I have decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to help transform the space frontier of the 1970’s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human en
deavor in the 1980’s and 90’s….

  The new system will differ radically from all existing booster systems, in that most of this new system will be recovered and used again and again—up to 100 times. The resulting economies may bring operating costs down as low as one-tenth of those [of] present launch vehicles.

  If you get the chance to talk with a modern-day NASA engineer or manager, don’t mention that one-tenth figure unless you want to see her beverage come out of her nose. It’s not NASA’s fault that the projection never came true—with the generous resources of the Apollo era, they probably could have done it.

  Students of space policy might wonder why in the seventies, with the goals of Apollo accomplished, the government didn’t simply shut NASA down entirely. The agency had been created to accomplish a very specific task and had accomplished it. But Caspar Weinberger, who was then deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, warned Nixon that ending NASA would lead to claims that “our best years are behind us.” He said, “America should be able to afford something besides increased welfare, programs to repair our cities, or Appalachian relief and the like.” This is another great example of the ways in which spaceflight can be made to seem a paragon of, or negation of, any political ideology. But Weinberger’s argument won: Nixon did not want to be remembered as the president who shut down a source of national pride, the president who canceled the future. No president does.

  As historian Howard McCurdy puts it, Nixon’s “need to maintain political support in aerospace states such as California and Texas contributed to his decision to maintain the human space flight effort, but so did his sense that NASA oversaw one of the few remaining technologies of optimism at that time.”